100/100

[originally written on my blog]

I don't understand how you make a film that looks like this and then go on to make 32 subsequent films (and counting) that look nothing like this. But then, neither do I understand how you achieve the perfect synthesis of your many gifts and somehow conclude that you totally whiffed, to the point where you beg the studio to destroy the negative. Each of the film's tricky balancing acts—between visual beauty and verbal dexterity, between wit and pathos, between the specific and the universal—couldn't be more sublimely realized; like most every masterpiece, it's a tiny, insular story that nonetheless embodies human folly at its most ubiquitous and grandiose. That Woody chooses to make…

“Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat—oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be.”

Is life fundamentally sweet or sour? Depends on your point of view, I suppose. You get a new job, make a new friend, fall in love—life is honeyed and worth living. You lose that job, have a falling out with that friend, fall out of love—life is curdled and should be thrown out. The funny thing is, those circumstances don’t parcel themselves out discretely. They tend to coexist. You get a promotion but have a fight with your spouse about the…

Film #3 of Florin's Recommendations

“I feel like we're in a Noel Coward play. Someone should be making martinis.”

Isaac Davies is the typical Woody Allen character, an underachieving intellectual who is not confident enough to do what he wants to do in life, someone who is living a romantically –and of course sexually- problematic life and seems to struggle with the endless complexities of human relationships, someone who has always been one step away from achieving success but the fear of rejection and the lack of confidence have kept him from reaching greatness and happiness, an individual who is desperately searching for the meaning of life in a time and place where things- thanks to modernization- are changing so…

Few will deny that Woody Allen, as a director, is formulaic as fuck, especially thematically as nine out of ten of his pictures revolve around male-female romances with some oddity about them - often triangular or double-triangular to add extra conflict. Personally though, I really don’t mind since the format appeals to me and Woody’s releases, even his newest, manage to inflict on me the emotions they attempt to inspire: a smile, a bit of warmth and light upset due to characters’ choices and habits. Manhatten, following his most acclaimed feature Annie Hall, may as one of his earliest efforts have rolled out the red carpet for his impressive filmography and this fact is obvious from its romantic-comedy structure. Yet,…

I adore this film. The way in which it uses the city of NY as a metaphor to personify this idea of nostalgia and longing for the past is really interesting. The cinematography and use of music throughout this film is really striking in general, to be honest. This movie was released in 1979 but the majority of the music used was from the 1920's and 30's, which I think links into how, the character of, Isaac longs for a simpler time, when people and their values were "simple".

The entire conflict of this film is centered around that. One of the things I noticed was that Isaac was quite (low-key) misogynistic and only really saw woman was "pretty" objects.…